The present invention relates to the measurement of computer performance.
Performance tools are used to measure the performance of a computer. The performance of a computer may be evaluated for a variety of purposes. For instance, it may be desired to make a "quick scan" of a computer system. What is meant by a quick scan is an examination of what is currently happening on the computer system in "real time". A quick scan may be done, for instance, when system performance is poor and it is desired to identify which processes are utilizing which computer resources and thus causing the poor performance.
Alternately, a determination of the "state of the system" may be done in order to evaluate the total resource utilization of the system. Such a determination may be done to discover which resources cause slow downs or bottlenecks in system performance. Once identified these resources may be upgraded to improve system performance.
Another reason for evaluating computer performance may be for "application tuning", that is to focus on a particular user application or situation to determine how to improve system performance as regards that particular application or situation.
Finally, performance tools may be used for "trouble shooting", that is determining why system performance degrades for no immediately apparent reason.
In the prior art, performance tools have been written for sophisticated computer technicians to aid in trouble shooting. The general philosophy has been the more data that is generated the better. When these performance tools have been adapted for other uses such as for quick scans, determination of the state of the system or for application tuning, the performance tools have generated too much information. This information is often incomprehensible to the average computer user.
In some system attempts have been made to arrange and to present gathered data in some form which may be deciphered by a user. However, such systems have not proved practical for gathering and presenting data for system performance over a long period of time. This is because the programs typically log an immense amount of information, before the information is later reduced. The memory resources required for such data logging are inordinate. A typical prior art performance system may log one hundred twenty million bytes in a typical twenty-four hour period. Not only is this burdensome on memory resources, but it also takes a lot of processing power to generate this information and then to manipulate this data into a form which is useful to a user.